This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
Title: About David Chou
David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments.
David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...
Key technology initiatives for CIOs working in the healthcare providers space will include technologies that focus on the following:
remote patient monitoring
possible the use of VR technology
iOT and sensor integration
enhancing the virtual care offerings
CIOs are working hard to ensure that their IT strategy aligns with the organization's long term objective of improving access while providing a great digital experience.
"Our organization's strategic initiatives are around access & growth, patient value, quality, safety, and innovation. IT is partnering with the business to develop capabilities to enable the health system to deliver on these priorities" - Ben Patel, CIO, Cone Health.
"Acceleration of digital services with a patient and consumer digital front door incorporating AI and focusing on relationship management initiatives that include the use of self-service" - Craig Richardville, CIO, SCL Health
"Our organization has three focus areas: quality, patient experience, and affordability. IT is developing a digital platform focusing on clinical productivity and patient experience while driving innovation for the organization" - Raymond Lowe, CIO, AltaMed
Key enterprise initiatives for the CIO include the following:
Modernize the ERP system
Upgrade the IT security posture
Optimize the current EMR system.
"Optimization and transformation initiatives with Epic Refuel and ERP replacement to simplify and standardize workstreams" - Craig Richardville, CIO, SCL Health
"Continue to improve my security posture with the focus on known threats. Reduce Physician and Nurse dissatisfaction and burnout by optimizing the EHR" - Tom Stafford, CIO, Halifax Health
"Zero Trust Security Model implementation - going from reactive to authentication/zero trust throughout. Starting with policies in FY20 and moving to systems in FY21 and beyond" - Aaron Miri, CIO, Dell Medical School & UT Health Austin
"ERP and EMR optimization are two of the top initiatives that the IT department is working on for 2020" - Zafar Choudry, CIO, Seattle Children's Hospital
This is a good preview of what to expect from the healthcare provider CIOs. Stay tuned for the healthcare 2020 trends reports.
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research
R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg.
Short Bio
R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...
Awards Showcase What Was Top Of Mind In Enterprise Technology At The End of The Decade
This year the Constellation Research team attended over 270 events, engaged in 1000s of inquires and briefings, conducted 1000s of media inquiries, and almost touched one billion impressions in the social sphere. As disruptive technology in the past decade evolved from cloud, AI, social, mobile, IOT and big data, 2019 saw the evolution and maturity of IOT, 3D printing, 5G, robotics, mixed reality, AI, and quantum computing. Top of mind business themes included the privacy rights, data-driven digital networks, stakeholder capitalism, augmented humanity, and digital ethics.
Before the team ushers in the new decade, Constellation takes one last moment to reflect on 2019, an era of the best US economy in history, the most divisive politics and discontent around the world, and a year where technology remained in the spotlight for political, economic, societal, environmental, and legislative mind share. Tech went from a force of good to a force for evil in a blink of an eye.
Amidst this backdrop, the Constellation Research team is proud to announce the 2019 Enterprise Awards.
BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE STARTUP
This category recognizes when an enterprise software startup achieved escape velocity in mind share and relevance.
Outreach, which is a sales acceleration app that automates contact sequences and gives inside salespeople prioritized activities and recommended next best actions. It may sound pretty simple, but what they do helps companies operate like they have much bigger sales teams, get more quickly to the real opportunities that are likely to close, and focus on sealing the deal. They're officially a unicorn with the latest round of funding they got earlier this year--now valued at $1.1B on about $100M in revenue that is growing like crazy.
DataGrail made their big splash as the purpose-built privacy platform taking on GDPR compliance. So, it is understandable that in their early days, their primary marquee customers were EU based grappling with the realities of compliance. But now, the Menlo Park, CA based venuetackles all things privacy, trust and transparency just in time for California, Nevada and New York to usher in punishing data privacy, security and governance demands via regulation. DataGrail allows an organization to identify and map applications and the data they bring into the enterprise…think of them as the easy button of compliance with hundreds of pre-built application connectors and integrations for data lakes and the promise of no-code on-boarding. The goal here is that new systems can be automatically detected, and privacy requests performed without involving application owners. In other words, you can check off the opt-out, inventory and tracking demands of new regulations like CCPA while also managing the opt-in, security, quality and permissions tracking demands of GDPR. Considering how much chaos is expected in the privacy space in 2020, DataGrail might prove to be the right startup at the right moment in time.
Bellevue, Washington based EagleView'saerial imagery, data analytics and geographical information system solutions pioneers in the global aerial imagery market. With a $125M patent court win against rival Verisk and its Xactware Solutions unit behind them, and the arrival of Michael Park in January, this company is building a data-driven digital network that fights insurance fraud, improves government planning, enables smarter construction, and allows utilities to scale maintenance.
Invoca, whose AI-based solutions analyze call conversations (mostly sales, but anything inbound) to identify customer insights. Invoca's tools get used to drive tighter connections between marketing campaigns, advertising spend, and business results. Along the way--and this is what I find most impressive about it--the tools highlight all kinds of issues that impact customer experience (like IVR systems that aren't programmed effectively, hold times to get to salespeople that are way too long, support issues that are diverting potential upsets). They're providing the substance that allows different departments (often marketing or analytics teams) to have the right conversations with other parts of the business to make the changes that lead to really significant improvements. This is the kind of stuff that helps to grow top line revenue and drive bottom-line cost savings at the same time.
San Francisco-based Sisustood out in a crowded BI and analytics market by taking a focused approach to addressing business problems instead of piling on yet more tools for developing reports and dashboards. Sisu focuses on delivering diagnostic analytics that go beyond telling organizations what happened to informing them why things changed. Sisu does root-cause analysis over time to make it clearer why key performance indicators are headed in the right or wrong direction. It's the crucial first step to knowing how to act to ensure better outcomes.
BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE VENDOR
This category recognizes the enterprise software vendor who improved their customer relevance, market share, customer satisfaction, and brand standing.
Zoho has emerged as one of the winners in delivering business productivity and enterprise class applications to the small and medium sized business market. Their success gives them an opportunity to go up-market to the enterprises who continue to see escalating costs and a slowdown of innovation in the enterprise software market.The company's ever-expanding portfolio is designed as constituent parts of a greater whole, so everything works together. Led by Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder and CEO, Zohohas found a formula to digitize businesses at scale. With an estimated valuation of $2 billion (USD) for Zoho, the company remains private and has not taken any investments from venture capitalists. The relentless focus on reinvention and new ways of working has enabled the organization to deliver not only innovation at scale, but also a massive breadth of business applications and platform.
Splunk, a popular cloud-based analytics platform has been on a roll for several years now, recently reaching 18,000 enterprise customers. The company has reached an inflection point with the installation current CTO, Tim Tully, mantra product design says that products such as theirs should be “indulgent”, beautiful, and eminently usable. The company’s stylish user experiences and famously incisive analytics visualizations rank at the top of the industry.
Smartsheet, a publicly traded SaaS company that offers enterprise-grade work management solutions, has one of the most engaged and enthusiastic customer followings in the tech business. Far from being cultish, however, the company achieves this passionate status by delivering one of the most practical and effective collaboration tools in the industry.
BEST ENTERPRISE SERVICES VENDOR
This category recognizes the enterprise services vendor that transforms delivery models and crafts new client-centric market approaches.
Massive mind-share among clients, continuous string of tuck-in acquisitions, deep technology partnerships, and overall client satisfaction boost Accenture to the top. With thought leaders across every technology team and the first female CEO in the company's history, the managing director team bench strength remains just as strong as the college recruits. Accenture's growth over the past 5 years has shown a stock price from under $100 to above $200.
Capgemini acquisition of Altran for product engineering services placed the European based global powerhouse in the midst of the biggest growth area for the global services sector. As the firm transitions from the legendary leadership of Paul Hermelin, the last of the Serge Kampf disciples, to CEO in waiting Aiman Ezzat, they enter a new era where organizations must determine when enterprises move to full automation, augmentation of humans by machine, augmentation of machines by humans, and full human judgment. Capgemini has often played a significant role in helping organizations think different and take a more humanistic view of technology.
Source: TCS
The TCS team and CEO Rajesh Gopinathan continue to execute and take market share at a time the service market faces massive challenges in building top line growth and managing operating profitability per employee. Areas such as TCS interactive and the Research and Innovation teams are powering the future growth of the venerable Global Services firm. TCS has found the right balance in crafting digital offerings and supporting the real work needed to modernize IT.
BEST TECH ACQUISITION
This category recognizes the enterprise tech acquisition that has the most impact for customers, market landscape, and the overall industry direction.
Winner: Google - Looker
Why did they win?
Google Cloud is currently in a distant third position when it comes to cloud provider market share. To gain market share it needs to get more of a share of enterprises IT spending, and a Analytics / BI solution like Looker fills exactly that role. Looker caters also well with the bigger Google Cloud play of bringing AI, BigData and ML to the masses - the technical savvy business user. Looker's ability to be embedded gives Google Cloud additional load and CxO in enterprises more options to address analytics and visualization needs in the next generation application projects.
Looker's strengths include its centralized data-modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on top of modern cloud databases, including Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake, but it's biggest partner before the acquisition was Google. With each joint deployment, customers bring significant amounts of data for analysis onto the Google Cloud. The early, encouraging signs are that Google will give Looker enough autonomy to retain tight integrations with Redshift, Snowflake, Azure SQL and whatever sources and platforms customers might want to use. Yet to be seen is whether Google investment and AI and ML technology will help Looker bolster its self-service and augmented analytics capabilities.
Runners Up: Apple - Intel Mobile Business, and Thales - Gemalto
Why did they win?
In July 2019, Apple acquired a majority of Intel's smartphone modem business worth $1 billion. This patent trove, talent pool, and self-sufficiency gives Apple a leg up to push back on Qualcomm chips in its future devices. Apple also brought over 2200 Intel employees and over 17,000 core patents from protocols for cellular standards to modem architecture, and modem operations. With the clock ticking on the 6-year truce with Qualcomm, Apple has the ability to finally break free from licensing deals. In fact, the fully integrated supply chain and technology platform will free Apple from third-party dependencies. Recent revelations show Intel lost multiple billions of dollars in the sales as it battled against Qualcomm's anti-competitive behavior.
Thales Groupannounced the $4.65 billion acquistion of Gemalto in December 2017. After a long delay with the European Union competition commission, Thales unloaded the Thales General Purpose HSM unit to Entrust Datacard as part of the settlement to finally close the deal in April 2019 . The acquisition led to the aggregation of a comprehensive suite of hardware key management, smart card, and epersonal identity devices with one mega conglomerate.
BEST PARTNERSHIP
This category recognizes the enterprise partnership that delivered the most impact for customers and the market.
Winner: Google's Ascension Health partnership
Why did they win?
Healthcare took center stage this year with the public cloud companies clamoring over healthcare partnerships. One of the nation’s leading non-profit health systems, Ascension, partnered with Google Cloud's AI and ML solutions to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes. With over 2600 sites of care including 150 hospitals and over 50 senior living facilities, this mega-partnership drew concern among regulators. More than just shifting workloads to the cloud, using GSuite, and putting new tools to work for front line healthcare delivery teams, Project Nightingale, seeks to modernize healthcare with a data-driven approach to transforming the continuum of care. Asscenion's reach provides Google with massive population health data and a good cohort data set to apply ML and AI. This deal represents the battle for industry data in data-driven networks and will be the first of many across industries.
EMR and healthcare tech giant, Cerner, takes a major step towards modernizing their enterprise applications with a cloud first mentality. Historically, the Cerner culture built applications with a not invented here approach. However the opportunity to build in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), opened up opportunities to rethink and recreate the core Cerner application. Migrating the core Cerner application to AWS, along with the utilization of AWS machine learning platform will hasten the move for Cerner clients towards population health management and value based care.
BEST CEO
This category recognizes the best enterprise CEO. Enough said.
Aneel Bhusri has shown the persistence and patience that is needed to potentially change the ERP category for the better. With the closure of the Analysis, Planning and Execution cycle, the back office gains all the innovations of the latest technologies delivered in the cloud. Originally starting with HCM, then adding Finance and more recently Operations capabilities, Workday has set out to inherently integrate analysis, planning and integration automation needs. As with all fundamental changes to the value proposition of a software category, this transition takes time and education of the markets. Both have been given and delivered by Workday with Bhusri pushing through numerous product development architectures as well as acquisition to get the 'virtual cycle' of ERP to a new level. Workday's next step will be the move of Workday's product to the public cloud, in order to take advantage of cheap compute and availability to fuel AI / ML capabilities that are needed to take ERP to the 21st century. Add a deep bench of management talent and a customer focused mission, Workday has delighted a wide range of customers to take market share from legacy players. The mission and purpose started by Co-Founder Dave Duffield and passed on to Aneel Bhusri appears to be on course to transform core operations software in the next decade.
Source: Constellation Research, Inc.
Runners Up: Thomas Kurian (Google), Marc Benioff (salesforce.com)
Why did they win?
It was a surprise when Oracle product leader and President, Thomas Kurian, switched his commute exit to a few exits south on US 101 from Ralston Road to Mathilda Avenue for Google Cloud. Since his hiring, Kurian has not rested as he expanded on the vision of Google Cloud way beyond the original vision of previous leader Diane Greene. No longer is AI / ML and security are the key value propositions, but Google Cloud has aggressively pursued next gen compute load, with Google Anthos. A bigger focus on GSuite for the future of work and a vertical apps agenda (e.g. in M=media) give Google Cloud a new and better shot at moving up from its current #3 position. A more ISV and open source friendly approach makes Google an attractive cloud provider for vendors that are worried to be squeezed out by larger IaaS players. An executive team overhaul, a bigger focus on go-to-market capacity and commitment to enterprise requirments round up the increased potential of Google Cloud in 2020.
Source: Google
Marc Benioff continues to find the balance between tech for social good and innovation sherpa for enterprises seeking business transformation. From hiring the top talent into salesforce.com for the past two decades to creating new roles such as Chief Equality Officer and creating the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, Marc has pioneered what the modern corporation may look like in the re-emerging trend of stakeholder capitalism. Since inception, Benioff has espoused an integrated philanthropic approach of pledging 1% of product, time, and resources, known as the 1-1-1 model. Salesforce.com has given more than $240 million in grants, 3.5 million hours of community service and product donations of more than 39,000 non-profits and educational institutions. Marc's presence at the World Economic Forum and Business Roundtable have shifted the corporate mindset and shown how tech companies can lead the way to improving global issues.
Source: Insider Associates, LLC
BEST NEW ENTERPRISE CATEGORY
This category recognizes the best new enterprise category that made an impact to the market.
Winner: Sales Engagement Platforms
Why did they win?
This category of tools pulls data from CRM systems, productivity tools (e.g. email, phone, collaboration, etc.), and other sources of customer information to organize, prioritize, and automate sales activities to improve close rates and deal sizes. In effect, Sales Engagement Platforms deliver a type of low-code workflow management tool (with a dash of ML and AI). Purpose built for sales people, the systems encapsulate best practices gleaned from actual results. With over 60+ sales engagement solutions in the market, this new category separates the wheat from the chaff. Key vendors embracing this category include: Clearslide, Dealhub, Groove, MixMax, Outreach, Reply.io, RevenueGrid, SalesLoft. Scaura, and Xant.
Runners up: Gig Economy For The Enterprise and Data Driven Digital Networks
Why did they win?
GigEconomy for the enterprise recognizes the ability to bring just in-time skills and resources and crowdsourcing platforms together in the future of work. The blending of free-lancers and full timers enable the best talent to be applied to the right engagement and project at all times. Vendors such as Gigster's PeopleCloud and Wipro's TopCoder exemplify this category.
Data-Driven Digital Networks apply disruptive and exponential tech such as Cloud, 5G, IOT, Blockchain, and AI to craft new businesses models with a subscription commerce, smart services, cross value chains, or joint venture approaches. The value of the network comes from the insight, not the transactions. These digital feedback loops power next best action, recommendations, and contextual decisions. IBM FoodTrust won this year's SuperNova Awards in this new enterprise category.
BEST NEW ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE MARKETING OF THE YEAR
This category showcases the best marketing campaign, ad, or perception transformation in the enterprise.
Legendary category king creator Chris Lochhead teamed up with Splunk's CEO Doug Merritt and CMO Carrie Palin to rebrand and relaunch Splunk as the Data To Everything Platform. The launch included President Obama's debut on the tech conference speaking circuit, rock-solid messaging, branding, and go-to-market playbooks. As one of the most sophisticated launches of the decade, the flawless execution has led to massive results with a 40% increase in software revenues, ARR of $1.44B up 53% year over year.
Source: Splunk
Runners Up: SAP, Oracle, and Google Cloud
Why did they win?
SAP's "Make The World Run Better" campaign features Clive Owen humanizing tech in a classy manner. With signs of the invisible hand of Marty Homlish of SAP and Omnicom fame, the ad hits hard at the tech lash and shows a shiny light forward. Think of this ad as the inside joke mockery of enterprise software the way Dennis Quaid makes fun of insurance ads for esurance.
Oracle took the sports marketing coup of the year with the transition from AT&T Park in San Francisco to Oracle Park. With the Oracle Arena housing the Golden State Warriors moving to the Chase Center, Oracle's marketing team, led by Judith Sims, picked up naming rights from AT&T. The 20 year and estimated $200M naming rights put competitors Adobe, Coupa, Salesforce, and Workday under the Oracle shadow on the giant scoreboard.
Google Cloud's push to make the enterprise "Googly" led to some creative and expensive ads with the second year of the NCAA partnership . While most sports fans could care less about the ads, the content was relevant and humorous and helped grow the brand awareness at a time Google Cloud Platform critically challenges Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for cloud dominance. The Constellation team found the ads almost at the high-brow level of the Adobe ads of 2017 and 2018. Hopefully in 2020, the Google Cloud marketing team, led by Alison Wagonfeld will focus on more account based marketing activities, field marketing, and event based activities as that's what effective enterprise marketing comes down to, not airport campaigns, and multi-million dollar ad spots. Yet, these ads were well done and award worthy and thus a runner-up.
BIGGEST TECH FLOP OF THE YEAR
This category simultaneously recognizes the highest potential and largest failure in enterprise tech
Winner: Foldable Phone Fail
Why did they win?
In searching for a new form factor away from the single surface and touch screen, Samsung, Huawei, and Royole attempted to launch a foldable phones in the upper $2000 price range. While the concept was attractive, the execution turned out to be a failure for both the Samsung Galaxy Fold, Huawei MateX, and Royole. Delays during the summer and a heated trade disupte dampened the launches for Huawei while Samsung faced another phone disaster with early users peeling of a key film thinking it was a protective cover. At the end of the day, the foldable phone fad came and went like the emphemeral Cannabis ruderalis. Despite this massive flop, expect Samsung to announce the improved and revamped version in February 2020 ahead of Mobile World Congress. Meanwhile, the new Motorola RAZR is back with a reimagined flip phone for 2020!
The overall tech IPO scene led a round of failures culminating in WeWork. The confluence of quadrillions of investor money, a rush to dominate markets as a monopoly, immature startup-founders, and a rush to build data driven business models with little experience led to WeWork's demise. In fact, this lack of good investment vehicles has every VC, PE firm, and sovereign wealth fund concerned about the lack of billion dollar unicorn prospects. How Andrew Neuman managed to score a G650 private jet for him and his wife with a board asleep at the wheel fully epitomizes the excesses of this era.
Facebook continued a massive fail in supporting privacy policies as Mark Zuckerberg's ethical relativism and Sheryl Sandberg's bad judgment calls over the past five years came home to roost as Facebook faced one massive scandal after another. With the government's three letter agencies chomping at the bit for an enforcement case and big fines, the distractions mounted at Facebook.
The big blue whale fail hit hard when containerization poster child Docker was acquired by a lesser-known but competent cloud consulting firm, Miarantis. Docker lost in adoption to the more nimble Kubernetes despite raising $280M in funding and failing to IPO or achieve profitability. Pure arrogance met hubris galore in the halcyon halo of early success. The merger may give Docker new life in the Miarantis Cloud Platform, however, Docker lost the battle and Google's Kubernetes won big league.
Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
About Liz Miller:
Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...
If you have an inbox, you may have received a helpful hint or 200 about the implementation of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It, along with a handful of other privacy, security and protection themed bills raced through California’s legislature between 2018 and 2019 and go into effect on January 1, 2020. Happy New Year!
Some emails I have received try to tie a common thread between CCPA and its European kissing cousin, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect in 2018. For those companies that took GDPR seriously and took the tough steps toward compliance, there is absolutely an advantage. Those actions won’t cover everything.
There ARE a couple ways that the two are VERY similar:
Both demand that an organization have a complete inventory and understanding of all sources of data. For CCPA that includes third party data.
Both aim to make consumers feel they are in more control over their personal data.
Both place a hefty price tag on ignoring the value of trust
Here is a not so quick list of what CCPA is and is not.
First up...who it covers:
CCPA applies to for-profit companies established in California (i.e. companies that do business in California) or are “indirectly” doing business (i.e. parents and subsidiaries of companies doing business in California) that meet one of the following:
Have gross annual revenues greater than $25 million
Buy, receive, or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers, households, or devices per year
Make 50 percent or more of their annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information. Selling is broadly defined as any exchange of data for something of value.
Next up...who is off the hook:
CCPA DOES NOT apply to:
Non-profits, smaller companies that don't meet the revenue thresholds, and/or those that don't traffic in large amounts of personal information
Now for what it covers and why it matters:
CCPA has a BROAD definition of personal data including name, phone number, addresses and other identifiers like title, employers and email address, but also includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, credit card numbers, purchase history, and “unique personal identifiers” including IP address, device identifiers, online tracking, location information, audio and biometric data. CCPA also includes household data.
CCPA EXCLUDES information that is publicly available such as property tax data or information from available government records, aggregated data as well as medical or health information that is otherwise governed by California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPPA).
CCPA gives rights to all California residents to have access to their personal information, to have it deleted and to opt out of any sale of their data.
Residents MUST be provided with a “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link on all websites and mobile apps and is a mandatory inclusion on the home page of a site. Sorry, you can’t bury it in the footer. It must be “clear and conspicuous.”
CCPA creates a "limited private right of action" for any consumer impacted by a data breach. The law permits consumers to bring a civil suit for statutory damages between $100 and $750 per consumer per incident, or actual damages, whichever is greater. This private right of action is ONLY related to breaches involving “nonredacted and unencrypted personal information” and only specific to a narrow segment of personal information.
CCPA requires transparency about data and information use. Specifically, residents have the right to request what personal information a business has collected and whether their information is being sold or disclosed for a business purpose to other parties.
CCPA empowers residents to request the deletion of their personal data and mandates that residents NOT be discriminated against for exercising their rights as outline by CCPA. Requests must be answered within 45 days.
CCPA has specific Privacy Policy requirements. If you were hoping a new section on “selling your data” was going to be it…think again. Complaint notices will inform consumers about how personal information is collected, how that data is used, and the individual categories of personal information the business has sold to third parties in the past 12 months.
The Privacy Policy must also reinforce the rights consumers have under CCPA including the ability to provide copies of personal information and the right to opt-out and the right to delete data.
CCPA gets specific about how to handle the sale of children’s data: businesses must first obtain opt-in consent for the sale of a minor’s data. Consent must be obtained from parents for kids under 13; teens 13-15 can provide their own consent.
As someone insane enough to sit down and READ both documents, I have to say that CCPA, while not as voluminous as GDPR, is just as poorly written with loopholes, questions and ouroboros-like mandates that seem to negate themselves by the end of the tome. An important note is that there are at least a dozen amendments already waiting for vote on CCPA as legislators, special interest groups and consumer watchdogs all pile on to streamline and strengthen the bill.
The bottom line remains the same: consumers have the expectation for data privacy and security and in the State of California, they have the right to opt-out and delete their data…if we fail them…they have the right to sue for a LOT of money.
My attitude about CCPA is like that of GDPR: we shouldn’t wait for legislators to define trust.
If we wait to secure the trust our consumers have in our brands, we will fail them, and we will be on the costly losing end of this stick. Both GDPR and CCPA are pains in our collective corporate rear ends. But they are both also an opportunity to kick our data and personalization agenda can down the road a bit.
Personalization requires data. Rich, contextual, relevant and resonant personalization that goes beyond slapping a familiar product or a customer’s name on an email demands customer data that sits at the core of CCPA. Now, we have a regulatory reason to have the tough conversations about organizational data practices to accurately and uniformly assess where and how this data is being collected, stored and used across the entire organization. It forces marketing to look beyond its walls and helps IT look within them.
Most of the CMOs I have spoken with about CCPA (and the lasting impact of GDPR) have said that it helped IT, Operations and Marketing have very different conversations about data. For smart teams, GDPR was the lightening rod to get data collected, cleaned and utilized to the benefit of the consumer. Now, CCPA is the lightening rod to further advance how third party, location and device data is integrated into the mix and better leveraged across all engagements.
You have a choice: see this as a curse or an opportunity. But know this…CCPA isn’t the last regulatory thrill ride. With legislation pending in New York, Nevada and new calls for federal data privacy and security standards, CCPA is just the beginning of the chaos.
Now…if you REALLY want to get into it…and can stand to read a little more...
Here is another bill to watch especially if you are in the game of selling connected devices in the State of California: CA SB 327 & AB 1906.
Approved and filed by the state in September 2018 with a start date of January 1, 2020
Together, these two companion bills regulate standards for IoT devices sold in California
They require the manufacturer of a connected device to equip the device with a “reasonable security feature appropriate to the nature and function of the device”, and the information it collects, receives or transmits
Also required are measures that “protect the device and any information contained therein from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure”
“Reasonable” security is further explained to be:
a means for authentication outside a local area network
a pre-programmed password unique to each device
OR a feature that requires a new password be generated before access to the device is granted for the first time
My take on this: these bills lack any teeth to make either of these truly worrisome for manufacturers. They have far more bark thanks to headlines around what “could” happy with bad actors getting their hands on data, passwords or devices themselves. If we are being honest, these IoT measures basically ask for stronger passwords. But we all know that passwords do not a comprehensive privacy and security practice make.
Without a clear path to enforcement, punishment and a dollar figure looming in the wake of breech, this isn’t going to counter the operational cost argument of holding up the manufacturing process to embed costly security directly into the device, so it is secured from the metal up.
So HAPPY NEW YEAR California! Let this be the decade of privacy and protection…wrapped in chaos and confusion if these bills are any indication. Regardless, the next 10 years are going to turn what we know about trust, privacy and identity on its ear so get ready. It’s going to be a fast, wild ride!
Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research
R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg.
Short Bio
R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...
With a new decade in front of us, what happens when the confluence of politics, economics, society, technology, environmental, and legislative forces meet the forces of humanity? Here are seven deep trends that will emerge to impact the next decade and more:
1. Human Ingenuity vs Intelligent Automation
In a world of AI possibilities and pervasive technology, when will society automate, augment a machine with a human, augment a human with a machine, and fully trust human ingenuity? This question will impact the future of humanity. Should society over rely on automation, will humans lose the ability to gain intuition, will society become dumber, do humans become over-reliant on technology? Will intelligent automation widen the gap between the smart and the less intelligent? Do we create further digital divides? Over time, AI ethics will emerge taking people centered principles.
2. Autonomous Decade
The future is autonomous. Machines will deliver services that are continuous, auto-compliant, self-healing, self-learning, and self-aware. The need for greater precision decisions will require connections to data-driven digital networks and for more and more sources of data. This battle for public, private, and shared data will shape who wins in new networked economies.
3. Authenticity vs Deep Fakes
In this world of relativism and enhanced technologies, humans can no longer discern authenticity. The blurred line between reality and fiction creates issues that can cause riots, incite violence, sway public opinion, and bilk others of value. The need for authenticity still remains and those brands, enterprises, and individuals who can deliver authenticity will win over trust and significant business.
4. The US vs China, Open Vs Closed
China’s salvo to dominate the world models after how colonial powers ruled the past and how America rose to the top. From infrastructure investments to trade deals to foreign affairs, this new war for ideas is more than just open vs closed. China seeks to ensure its relevance and future before its population dynamics turn it into Japan. In the US-China trade-war, the implications move beyond just trade:
Currency manipulation
IP theft
Access to China markets
Reserve currency for dictatorships
HK protests
Spratly Islands debate
Belt & road
Battle for Africa
Freedom of Taiwan
AI dictatorships
However, like the Soviet Union in the 1950’s and 1960’s, many are attracted to the opportunities for personal enrichment at the expense of personal freedoms. This war for ideas with a backset of socialism vs capitalism will play out in the 2020’s
5. Stakeholder vs Shareholder Capitalism
The shift away from shareholder capitalism represents a backlash towards extreme capitalism in a winner takes all market. In simplistic terms shareholders own a part of the company while stakeholders have an interest in the performance of the company. Today’s wide definition of stakeholders includes employees, suppliers, the environment, and other ecosystem players. With the growing societal discontent in play and businesses caught in the cross-fire, organizations such as the Business Roundtable and World Economic Forum have embraced the stakeholder capitalism theme and mantra as a potential solution to the inequities in the market as well as addressing societal ills exacerbated by political systems and ineffective government leadership. Unfortunately a real divide will occur when institutional investors challenge the effectiveness and performance of stakeholder capitalism run companies vs shareholder run companies.
6. A Culture of Abundance Vs A Culture of Scarcity
The recent societal unrest and backlash against institutions has come from those who experience a culture of abundance and those who experience a culture of scarcity. Because basic needs are met and expectations often remain low in a culture of abundance, individuals are more willing to share, collaborate, take time to build long-term relationships. In a culture of scarcity, individuals fight for basic needs and create defenses and alliances of mutual self-interest. With rising expectations and a culture of entitlement, the recent societal unrest have come from a belief that injustice, inequality, and divide have come from those who live in a culture of abundance and that those in a culture of scarcity must attack those who are successful. Add mistrust of today’s systems and institutions, and society now must fight to defend a culture of hard work and meritocracy versus identity politics and social injustice.
7. Privacy as a Property Right
Data driven digital networks power most new companies and startups. Data to date has mostly been a free natural resource. As organizations have mined individual’s digital exhaust, digital foot print, genomic data, and personal information for profit without payment, a movement to make privacy a human right has taken hold. However, existing laws to govern this right vary from authority to authority and the policies remain inconsistent. Yet, should individual privacy data become a property right such as land titles for physical property and patents for intellectual property, existing laws could apply. Individuals would then have the authority to not sell, donate, provide one-time access, provide recurring access, or provide life-time access for value exchange. One caveat, in this model, only the rich would have privacy as they would not need to broker their data for monetary and non-monetary value exchange.
The Bottom Line: Digital Divides, Winner Takes All, and Duopolies Will Dominate The Decade
Capitalism as one knows it has shifted from free markets to an extreme winner takes all market. Massive concentration of power by the mega investor class has exponentially skewed the market. In fact, the largest 30 shareholders control 51.4% of the assets of 300 publicly traded companies, with 1.5% of those shareholders controlling 51% of shares. Companies are incessantly being asked by these shareholders to pay out greater and greater short-term profits at the expense of long term investment and growth.
To add insult to injury, these same investors hedge their bets by demanding more returns and stripping the profits out of their cash cow portfolio companies to fund disruptive startups in the same or adjacent markets. These well-funded startups often run large losses to take market share and cripple incumbents in their race for market dominance. While it may have taken previous businesses decades to emerge as oligopolies or duopolies through natural market forces, today's investors and founders craft every one of these startups to be a monopoly on day one. The investor class mainly funds startups that can rapidly achieve monopolistic positions.
Meanwhile, the digital transformation revolution has gone mainstream. In this post-digital era, every startup begins as a data driven network (DDN) where data and insight fuel growth and power market dominance. DDNs build massive digital feedback loops for all stakeholders (e.g. customers, employee, suppliers, and partners) and use this insight to mitigate risk, identify new opportunities, improve operational efficiency, anticipate what features buyers may want next, and drive dynamic pricing. Applying technologies such as AI and the cloud to scale, these organizations use their scale in automated decisions to dominate markets.
As these DDNs grow, their data and insights give them exponential advantage and their monopolistic powers increase. This is why companies such as Google continue to dominate search, Facebook remains a leader in social, Alibaba dominates digital payments. Using this dominance, each DDN will enter new markets and value chains that bring a powerful aggregation of capital, customer, content, network ecosystem, technology, and talent together.
The emergence of these market forces create ripple effects even among the winners of digital transformation. For example, Domino's Pizza who's stock was one of the best performing since 2010 faces an onslaught by these DDNs. Domino's beat its duopoly rival Pizza Hut with massive investment in new business models, digital technologies, and product innovations over a decade. By all accounts, Domino's succeeded at digital transformation emerging as the 5th most popular ecommerce site in the United States, out performing tech stock in returns, and gaining market share among rivals.
However, companies like Domino's may be ill prepared to win against DDN startups in food delivery aggregation and ghost kitchens in the next three years. Why? Customers order once a week at most with Domino's but order multiple times a week with Door Dash, Grub Hub, and PostMates. While these competitors don't even have their own kitchens, they are owning the customer experience and the customer. Many food delivery sites pair up with ghost kitchens, which prepare a wide range of genres in separately branded store fronts for scale. With more than $2B raised by these food aggregators and ghost kitchens, Domino's faces the company's biggest challenge for relevance and mindshare with customers.
With 50 mega value chains across multiple industries, 100 organizations will emerge as duopolies. Over 90% of the Fortune 500 by 2050 will be merged, acquired, or go bankrupt as quadrillions of capital flows exchange hands. Given the massive amounts of capital to fund new DDN startups as monopolies on Day 1, today's CEO plays against a stacked deck with limited options to achieve sustainable growth as their investors bet against them. Success will require CEO's to build DDNs, partner in existing DDN's, or be punished for not participating in these DDNS.
Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.
She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!
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As we close out the year and head into 2020, it’s a great time to reflect on what we’ve learned (good and bad) and put those lessons into practice in the new year. I believe we should also pay it forward and share those skills with our friends and community.
One of my favorite times of the week is during DisrupTV. The main goal of this show is to share knowledge with our community. No strings attached! Totaling 41 episodes this year, we interviewed and caught up with some incredible guests, including startup CEOs, enterprise executives, analysts, authors, media, and other disruptive leaders. Topics spanned leadership, AI, customer experience, disruptive tech, advice, marketing, healthcare, education and more.
If you have some time to listen to the podcasts or watch a few episodes in your down time, check out some of my favorite episodes of the year:
Cheers! Hope you have a wonderful holiday season. We’ll see you in 2020 with all new interviews to get more real-world advice and continue learning and sharing! If you want to be a guest or know someone interesting who we could all learn from, please send me a note!
Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
About Liz Miller:
Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...
With the holidays upon us, some of us (OK, specifically me…I have a toddler who just figured out Santa…) are racing around collecting lists and trying to make dreams come true. But what do some of the amazing brains across the Constellation network want to see from Santa? Don’t hack Santa’s inbox…I gathered the list.
(DISCLAIMER: I can neither confirm nor deny the rightful positioning of any of the below individuals on the “Naughty or Nice” list and cannot guarantee Santa can deliver on any of the below requests. Especially Richie's.)
Cindy Zhou, Chief Marketing Officer at LogRhythm: One business wish for Santa - empathy for the marketer. We're in the nexus of all-things customer experience, digital transformation, and delivering pipeline at the same time. Recognize us as part of the data tribe, and not merely arts and crafts.
Joanne Moretti, Founder & CEO of J Curve Digital: For ALL business leaders to invest in education. The education of their people, and of kids in general. To me education (before sales) is the cure-all. Unfortunately, "education by postal code" (as we experience here in the US) is wrong and leaves half our brain tied behind our backs as a country. If we have an educated country, we will thrive in a globalizing economy. Innovation will flow through naturally. Education at every level, academic or on the job wise, that is captured and shared, will foster better and faster innovation cycles. That's my wish: GREAT EDUCATION FOR ALL PEOPLE, and again not by postal code or job class, but for everyone, all the time.
Zachary Jeans, VP Marketing at AbsenceSoft: Measurements and engagement value for our brand when it comes to our people, especially how we treat our existing people in times of need and how we treat rejected job candidates. We have to start understanding the impact of a rejected job candidate – how does it negatively impact an organization’s brand over 1-10 year horizon, especially within their given industry? Can we get the real ROI on treating a candidate poorly? Same questions hold true on the subject of leave management. When we treat our colleagues poorly or mishandle a leave, for pregnancy, illness or a family medical issue, we know that when that colleague or employee returns they’re likely already searching for a new employer. So I’d like to start measuring the things that we all know are REAL, but have been left to anecdotal or vague correlation.
Geof Corb, Vice President, Higher Education Development at Oracle: Sweep away the term "digital transformation." In my opion, it has become a nonsense marketing term to describe what would have been natural, organic evolution of our organizations facing changing (disruptive or not) technology. Nothing new here. We technologists have been doing this forever, but now there is a flashy term that is getting tired and distracts from the fact that it's all about (business) outcomes and not the technology itself!
Sunder Sarangan, Strategy and Growth Leader: It is time for Santa to replace corporate jargon or political correctness in the workplace with radical candor. Brutal honesty in the most respectful manner lets us say goodbye to the compliment sandwich that plagues everything from emails to all forms of feedback. Or maybe he could bring an AI reader to interpret what people are truly trying to communicate…a bit like reverse auto-correct.
Gurvinder Singh Shani, Chief Marketing Officer at Appirio (a Wipro Company): Looking for Tech that can sync up with Marketing and make sense for CMO’s - they have been dating for while…
Richie Etwaru, Founder, Chief Executive & Chair of Board, Hu-manity.co: Automatic faucets and automatic sanitary napkin dispensers in airport bathrooms to work. We should just all admit they were a bad idea from the start. I don’t think there was ever a positive ROI on any of those things. They bring out the worst because they break, people get angry, they beat the crap out of them, they break, and then someone must pay to fix/service.
Happy Holidays to all...may the New Year bring everything on our list and much, much more!
Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies.
Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...
I'm piling on the annual ritual of year-end-reviews. Here's my roundup of high points from 2019, with links to my deeper analyses.
Biggest deal of the year:Salesforce buys Tableau. At $15.7 billion, this one takes the size prize. The critics says it's just Salesforce buying revenue. I agree it's not as synergistic as it could be and they'll have to work out overlaps, but as I point out in this blog, Salesforce is the one acquiring company that tends to retain the leadership and culture of the companies it acquires. Tableau has a unique culture, as is always apparent at the annual Tableau Conference, and if the acquirer can't retain that vibe, they'll lose the value of the company. As witnessed at Dreamforce 2019, Salesforce is really good at keeping the vibe going, so I think Tableau is in good hands.
Best acquisition of the year:Google buys Looker. Up-and-comer Looker gives Google a serious foundation for next-generation BI and analytics. Yes, Looker will have to maintain its support for third-party cloud databases, like Snowflake, Redshift, and Azure SQL, but I really like the data-modeling, reusability and embedding potential of Looker. As I note in this blog, Google is a good position to help Looker with its augmented analytics capabilities, which are nascent. It's a good sign that the Looker team is staying focused on its pre-acquisition priorities and mission.
Analytics trend to watch:Embedding in Applications. The complaint used to be about too much data; now I'm hearing companies lament they're drowning in insights. Lots of business types are less interested in the what-happened analysis than the "what should I do about it" recommended actions. In this blog I write about how Oracle, SAP and Workday and ramping up their efforts to embed anlytics directly into their applications. Salesforce is doing the same thing with Einstein Analytics, though it puts an extra emphasis on recommended actions tied to desired outcomes. Watch this space. My first report of 2020 will be on embedded analytics, but not just in commercial, off-the-shelf apps. I'm seeing innovators and fast followers developing custom analytic applications and data- and insight-driven services that drive action, not just analysis.
Talking the Talk prize for 2019:Cloud planning vendors. I attended every cloud-based planning event in 2019 (Anaplan, Host Analytics, Workday/Adaptive Insights, among others) and they were all talking about adding human-augmenting "AI" capabilities -- but none of them actually had anything to show. They were all positioning and previewing over the spring and early summer shows. Finally, as they year was coming to a close, Anaplan made a concrete announcement about a predictive sales planning capability based on "AI-enriched insights." The capability is said to be available as of this December 18, 2019 announcement, but I won't get a briefing until 2020. In short, I'm expecting 2020 to be the "walking the walk" year for computer-augmented planning capabilities.
Big-picture tech trend: Open source adoption. Open source software is absolutely becoming the standard for enterprise and tech broadly. It started with Linux, which is the standard operating system of the cloud today. Open source is also winning in databases, with PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Cassandra all gaining ground in 2019. Open source dominates in data science, with Python (overtaking R) and frameworks such as TensorFlow, scikit Learn and other leading choices all being open source. In the streaming realm, Kafka is now ubiquitous. For 2020 and beyond I have my eye on the Alluxio virtual distributed file system and Presto SQL query engine as hot open source standards. It’s not so much the cost equation that's driving open source adoption, as you end up paying for support and, often, enterprise features available on top of the open source technology. The real value in open source is the pace and breadth of innovation. Healthy open source communities attract contributions that no single company could develop on its own.
I've reached an age where the years seem to go by in a flash, and I'm seeing patterns repeating, like the acquisitions in the analytics space. Consolidation was a big trend in analytics in 2019. The headline examples were Looker/Google and Tableau/Salesforce, but there were smaller examples, such as ZoomData/LogiAnalytics and Periscope Data/SiSense. That trend will continue as competition heats up, but as we’ve seen before, the cycle will repeat itself after a period of complacency leads to a fresh round of innovation. There was a wave of consolidation in 2007/2008 with BusinessObjects/SAP, Hyperion/Siebel/Oracle and Cognos/IBM deals. At the time, many thought that would leave the lion’s share of the market in the hands of the large vendors, but instead it led to the self-service revolution and wave of new competitors. I’m sure history will repeat itself.
Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.
She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!
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11 more days of the decade! Can you believe it? This year has been full of ups and downs, and while I’ve learned a lot personally and professionally in 2019, I’m so ready to see what 2020 has in store.
As you head out to travel for the holidays and special new year celebrations, check out some of our favorite posts of the year. Some of these topics are very bold, disruptive and thought-provoking–and some are just fun!
As an added bonus, be sure to also read this brand-new blog series introduced this month, playing on the funny on-going joke at this year’s CCE, #AskingForVala: #AskingFor Liz- By Liz Miller.
Are these topics in line with your plans for 2020? What are your intentions for the year?
Enjoy the next 11 days, and we are looking forward to connecting with you in the new decade on more disruptive themes and real-world case studies.
Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
About Liz Miller:
Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...
Interesting acquisition news in security Thursday: F5 has announced intent to acquire fraud protection platform Shape Security for $1 billion USD in an all cash deal.
Shape evaluates the data flow into applications to discern good traffic from bad, defending web and mobile apps from malicious automated attacks. Sits in front of web and mobile app to detect and protect against automated bot attacks.
F5 has made a big name for itself in app protection across on-prem to multi-cloud with services and platforms to address load balancing, DNS services, web application firewalls (WAF), bot management, SSL visibility, identity and access federation, and DDoS mitigation.
Shape, once thought to be eyeing an IPO after a healthy Q3 funding bump, brings an impressive client roster across large banks, airlines, government and retail
F5 President and CEO, François Locoh-Donou said, via press release, that the move enables F5 to protect apps from “code to customer”
Why Shape Intrigues Me:
Positioned itself as looking beyond fraud detection and security – positioned security as an extension of customer experience friction resolution, removing the headache of constant login requests.
Been in the mix pushing the password-free experience, envisioning a world where passwords and logins are not needed thanks to proactive, real-time, intentional traffic detection and resolution
Their machine learning powered platform has effectively identified attack patterns and identified appropriate countermeasures…but their AI is learning what will likely come next for more proactive threat prediction making it a very interesting offer in the ever-evolving threat landscape. For me THIS is the exciting part of the acquisition, integrating the AI/ML model across the F5 platform, to apply some cognitive fire power.
Last Thoughts:
This sits in-line with industry trend of protect & detect from boot to edge as organizations like Palo Alto and now F5 are expanding their portfolio to provide enterprise customers with a far more comprehensive solution across all attack surfaces
While this conversation starts in security and fraud, the real gold here could be in advancing identity and a login-less user experience purpose built for both experience and security that drives revenue. BUT…it will require a mindset shift for organizations to understand that security and experience by design is a revenue driver.
Look for a feeding frenzy on AI powered security platforms in 2020. This isn’t the last unicorn we see race to the top carrying big bags of cash.
Vice President, Business Development and Sales
Constellation Research
Sherrie is responsible for acting as a liaison between clients and analysts while growing Constellation's footprint across North America. Prior to her career at Constellation, Sherrie worked with major technology suppliers of auto identification technologies as an account director at VDC Research.
Contact Sherrie at [email protected].
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By all measures, 2019 will likely be remembered as a very strange year that capped a very strange decade. The Great Economic Recession that kicked off the ‘10s displaced millions of global workers, leading to a tech boom as AI, ML, and RPA rushed in to fill the knowledge worker vacuum. It was a decade that was great to us in tech, and perhaps not so great to finance, legal, and heavy manufacturing.
From a sales perspective, the 20s will be a boon for reps in forward-thinking organizations who are able to innovate faster than their closest competitors while creating value for their customers, partners, and employees. Acquisitions will continue as IPO’s sputter; this means that front line sales reps will need to continuously expand their networks to avoid being labeled as redundant.
We’re in for an amazing ride this decade as technology finally races beyond the pace car of hype. Sales will continue to evolve as early adopters set the bar on customer expectations, forcing laggards to keep up, change, or go out of business. I’ll be writing a series of blogs over the coming months on how front-line sales reps can adapt in the ever-changing environment.
First up: Selling in the Age Where Everyone Is Up in your Business
A few weeks ago my hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, breathlessly headlined “No trick: Wayfair creeps customers out with new service calls” (Nov 1, 2019). I don’t think it’s headline news at this point that every time we click a mouse or glance at a Facebook ad for more than one second, we are being tracked and that interaction sold. For the most part that data has been sitting on a cloud, being leveraged to serve us up targeted ads. It’s why when we Google “best reusable water bottles” we are subjected to nothing but Hydroflask ads for the next two weeks.
This is Kindergarten Marketing 101. Top of the funnel Google searches at some point lead to revenue. Sure, you could ask the person riding next to you on the subway why they like their Yeti. Additionally, one could also spend a leisurely afternoon at the library pouring through Consumer Reports searching for the Holy Grail among Holy Grails: a well-designed metal flask that keeps water cold and tea hot.
However, that would require actually talking to people or leaving the house. Why do that when Google can get you an answer in 0.74 seconds? We are in an age where we are trading convenience for privacy and by and large, most of us are a-ok with that.
Wayfair took that one step further by pairing their Big Brother tracking software with information they already have in their CRM to identify individual customers who visited their website. Rather than serve them up ads or issuing endless “Did you want to purchase that couch?” spam e-mails, they had reps pick up the phone and call these potential customers in an attempt to close the sale.
Like all Boston Globe articles, the gold in this report was in the comments, which were as harsh as they were unanimous. In perhaps a Globe first, almost every commenter felt the same way: cold calling a prospect based on browsing behavior is Creepy AF.
This was an exercise, no doubt, dreamed up by some executive in marketing with zero B2C sales experience. Wayfair didn’t reveal if having reps cold call was successful, or how much additional revenue was created by this campaign. We are living in an era where front line sales reps have access to enormous amounts of information that they need to qualify a prospect and gauge their buying behavior before an outbound interaction even takes place. However, just because you have the ability to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. I honestly feel bad for those reps who were told to make calls and were likely on the receiving end of some very awkward conversations with some very upset prospects.
Customer data that used to cost time and money is now widely available and often for free. Rather than pick up the phone and asking to speak to the person who was in charge of buying office equipment, we ask for a specific person. We also know what that person looks like, roughly how old they are, where they live, where they went to school, and which common connections we have that I could perhaps leverage. They say in the courtroom a lawyer never asks a question that they don’t already know the answer to. Having information about a prospect is useful, but it isn’t a substitute for creating a human connection. However, that connection will not happen if you blurt out that you know they’ve visited your company’s website 12 times in the past 2 days.
This type of in-depth customer information has always been the missing link to what every sales organization is really after: mass personalization at scale. Identifying the right buyer with the right offer at the right time. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty that the only people you called on were pre-qualified executives who were looking specifically at the solution you were selling. We could spend all day every day talking to real buyers instead of wasting cycles with un-qualified prospects who have no need, budget, or authority to engage with you.
Like everything else in life, it’s all fun and games until the government gets involved. Not to be out-regulated by the European Union’s GDPR, California’s roll-out of CCPA next month will be a game changer, impacting how every outbound sales rep across North America prospects. For the time being we’re right back to where most of us never left: being a knowledgeable, polite, non-creepy professional who is there to partner if and when needed. The backlash over how this type of data is collected and monetized is real and if you don’t believe that I’m almost certain that one of Wayfair’s friendly reps can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.
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